ANSTY, John

It is often difficult to distinguish John from his namesakes in the Ansty family, for at one point there were four John Anstys alive, so increasing the chances of confusing one with another. In February 1450, for example, shortly before his seventy-second birthday, the MP’s father founded a perpetual chantry at his manor of Holme Hall in Stow-cum-Quy. The foundation deed mentioned the following namesakes: his son (the MP), his grandson (who would sit for Cambridgeshire in the Parliament of 1467) and his great-grandson (who would have been a minor at this date).19 Ibid. ff. 197-200; Add. 5826, ff. 167-70. Contemporaries used the titles ‘senior’ and ‘junior’ to distinguish between different John Anstys, but these changed with the passing of generations. For example, when the chantry founder (known as ‘John Ansty senior’) died the MP, formerly ‘junior’, became ‘senior’ and so on. Furthermore, not all of the surviving records use these sobriquets, making firm identification sometimes impossible.

The origins of Ansty’s father are obscure, but he perhaps came from the Midlands. The list of benefactors, headed by the King and queen, named in his chantry deed indicates that he served the Crown and various magnates during his career. The lords concerned were the recently-deceased Richard, Lord Strange of Knockin, for whom he had been a general receiver, the long dead Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, and the still living Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury. Also on the list was John Somerset*, the influential physician of the King and chancellor of the Exchequer.20 CPR, 1391-6, p. 153; 1441-6, p. 386; Reg. Gray, G1/5, ff. 197-200v; C1/6/168; W.G. Searle, Queens’ Coll. 28-33. Ansty’s father may well have had a connexion with the Court, since the Crown appointed him as auditor of Mortimer’s lands in several eastern counties after the earl’s death in January 1425. He also served the duke of Gloucester, no doubt in an administrative capacity, since he was at Guînes in February 1433 while the duke was captain of the fortress. By the 1420s he had established himself in Cambridgeshire where he served as sheriff, escheator, j.p. and commissioner, and in 1428 he received a quitclaim of the manor at Stow-cum-Quy that became the centre of his estate.21 CPR, 1422-9, p. 273; CP, viii. 453; Foedera ed. Rymer (Orig. edn.), x. 529; CCR, 1422-9, p. 398. His brass in the church of St. Mary in that parish indicates that he and his wife had no fewer than 12 boys and four girls, although only the MP and his sister Elizabeth, who was to marry John Morys*, definitely survived childhood. No will or inquisition post mortem for him survives and only the month (February) of his death is now visible on his brass, although it would appear he died in the late 1450s.22 Ventris, 218. Ventris, 218n, suggests that the elder John died between 1454 and 1458 but a royal pardon issued to the MP as John Ansty, late escheator of Cambs. and Hunts. (i.e. 1448-9) in Feb. 1458 gave him the sobriquet ‘junior’, so perhaps suggesting that his fa. was still alive at that date: C67/42, m. 16.

A lawyer by profession, the younger John was active by 1423, by which date he was working as an attorney in the exchequer of pleas.23 Baker, 217. Where he received his legal training is unrecorded although it is worth noting that he was described as ‘lately of the parish of St. Andrew’s Holborn’ in the later 1440s, when Richard Levermore sued him at Westminster over a debt of 40s. contracted in Middlesex.24 CP40/745, rot. 454d. Although he did not succeed his father until a quarter of a century or so later, Ansty was already a landowner in his own right by the mid 1430s, with holdings valued at £10 p.a. in a subsidy return of 1436.25 E179/240/268. Teversham was his place of residence when he took the general oath not to maintain peace breakers in 1434,26 CPR, 1429-36, p. 385. although it was ‘of Stow-cum-Quy’ that he received royal pardons in late 1452 and early 1456.27 C67/40, m. 10; 41, m. 10. It was of Teversham that he was obliged to answer a suit for debt at Westminster in early 1443. Five years previously he had entered into a bond as a security that he would pay the plaintiff, Robert Crane of Suffolk, £25 in the spring of 1442, and it was his alleged failure to honour that undertaking that prompted Crane’s suit. In Hilary term 1443 Ansty obtained licence to treat with his opponent out of court, only to lose the case through default by failing to reappear at Westminster in the following term.28 CP40/728, rot. 336.

In 1430 Ansty, his father and his first wife, Margaret, were party to a minor land transaction at Fen Ditton, Teversham and other parishes near Stow-cum-Quy.29 CP25(1)/30/97/29. Probably the mother of his sons John and Robert, Margaret died before the end of the 1430s, since he had married Joan Street by 1439. Joan was the daughter and, following the death of her brothers, eventual heir of Henry Street, a former coroner and minor official in Cambridgeshire who was perhaps already dead by that date.30 CCR, 1422-9, p. 215; A.F. Bottomley, ‘Admin. Cambs.’ (London M.A. thesis, 1952), 239. Her mother, Cecily, was of far more illustrious lineage, being the daughter and, ultimately, the heir of the Buckinghamshire knight Sir John Reynes by Katherine, daughter of Sir Peter Scudamore of Upton Scudamore, Wiltshire. Joan brought the Cambridgeshire manor of Streets in Meldreth to Ansty in marriage,31 VCH Cambs. viii. 86. but she and Ansty also sought to obtain lands formerly held by her Scudamore and Reynes ancestors. In 1439, they made a bid, based upon a fine of 1329 involving John Scudamore, for various lands in Hampshire occupied by Thomas Horner of Olney, Buckinghamshire. Nearly three years later, however, an assize jury upheld Horner’s claim that Sir Peter Scudamore’s father had alienated the lands away from his family through a deed of 1350.32 VCH Wilts., viii. 81; CP40/715, rots. 324, 472; 723, rot. 320. While this case was still ongoing, Ansty and his wife pursued three other property suits at Westminster. Two of them were also against Horner, one for falsely claiming their moiety of the manor of ‘Malotes’ (apparently in Cherry Hinton) and another for detaining a pyx containing deeds.33 CP40/715, rots. 149, 216. The third suit, in which the Anstys were co-plaintiffs with Joan’s cousin, Margaret, and her husband, John Gybon, was against several Reynes feoffees and concerned the manor of Clifton Reynes in Buckinghamshire. Margaret and Joan claimed the manor through their mothers, the daughters of Sir John Reynes. Although they and their husbands won the case in mid 1440, they were at odds with each other over the same property soon afterwards. At the beginning of 1441 the Anstys were at law against Joan’s sister and her husband, alleging that the Gybons were preventing a partition of it between the two heiresses. As it happened, neither Joan nor Margaret had a secure claim. In due course the manor passed to a cadet branch of the Reynes family, although probably not without considerable resistance from the Anstys since they appear to have had actual albeit temporary, possession of the whole property when the MP died.34 CP40/718, rot. 503d; 720, rot. 430d; PCC 21 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 161v-162).

So far as is known, Ansty began his career as an office-holder as under sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, a position he held during his father’s shrievalty of those counties in 1430-1. He entered the service of the bishops of Ely soon afterwards, for by Michaelmas 1432 he had succeeded William Fulbourn† (also his predecessor as steward of the bishop’s manor at Cottenham),35 Cambs. Archs. P50/3/1. as bailiff of the bishop’s liberty, thereby beginning an association with that see which lasted until his death. In 1433 he twice appeared at the Exchequer as an attorney, on one occasion for his father, then the escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, and on the other for William Fulbourn.36 E368/206, rots. 113d, 118d. For most of his career Ansty combined serving the bishops with holding office under the Crown. During the 1440s he was twice escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire and became a j.p. for both Cambridgeshire and the town of Cambridge. The circumstances of his election to three Parliaments as a knight of the shire for the county are unknown, but probably he enjoyed the support of the powerful Bourgchier family when he stood for the first two assemblies since they coincided with Thomas Bourgchier’s tenure of the see of Ely.37 CPR, 1436-41, p. 580. In early 1447, Bishop Bourgchier extended Ansty’s responsibilities as his bailiff and appointed him steward of the episcopal estates outside the Isle. By 1450 Ansty was also keeper of the bishop’s prison at Ely, receiving into custody a Dutch weaver who had said that the King resembled a child and would die before the end of the year. Next to the chief steward (the bishop’s nephew, Humphrey Bourgchier*, from January 1453) he was probably the most important lay official in the episcopal administration. No doubt a willing administrator, he probably won himself little popularity serving a bishop who had a reputation for severity as a landholder. Bourgchier’s detractors also alleged that he put off saying mass in his cathedral until his installation, which occurred three years after his appointment. Ansty was one of those present when the installation finally took place in March 1447.38 KB9/262/2; Reg. Bourgchier, G1/4, ff. 12, 34; Bottomley, 142-3; Oxf. DNB, ‘Bourchier, Thomas’.

Along with serving the bishop of Ely and the Crown, Ansty found work with other patrons and clients. Never a major landowner, he owed an important part of his earnings to his legal work: according to a subsidy return, in the early 1450s he received £20 p.a. in legal fees, half his total income in lands and fees combined.39 E179/81/103. Among those Cambridgeshire gentry he served as a feoffee were (Sir) Edmund Ingoldisthorpe* (his fellow knight of the shire knight in 1445), Laurence Cheyne* and Sir Thomas Fynderne*. He appears also to have performed the same role for Thomas Burgoyne* and in the mid 1450s he and John Green III* arbitrated in a dispute between Burgoyne and Reynold Arneburgh*.40 CCR, 1441-7, p. 390; CCR, 1454-61, p. 33; 1461-8, p. 157; CPR 1446-52, p. 259; C131/71/3. Ansty was also a feoffee for Henry Somer* (Somerset’s predecessor as chancellor of the Exchequer), and for the royal foundation of King’s College, Cambridge, which purchased Somer’s estates at nearby Grantchester after his death in March 1450.41 King’s Coll., Cambridge, archs., GRA/9, 11, 13, 14, 227, 230; KIN/16; VCH Cambs. iii. 379; v. 203.

Notwithstanding such work, the dominating feature of Ansty’s career was his connexion with the see of Ely, an association that continued following the elevation of Bishop Bourgchier to the see of Canterbury in 1454. Immediately prior to the translation of Bourgchier to Canterbury, the Crown assigned the keeping of the temporalities of the archbishopric to the bishop’s kinsmen and others, an arrangement for which Ansty stood surety on their behalf.42 CFR, xix. 86; CPR, 1452-61, p. 233. While the MP retained his offices in the episcopal administration after Bourgchier’s departure, there was a short-lived but serious falling out between him and the succeeding bishop, William Gray, some four years later. In the late 1450s Gray excommunicated Ansty and two subordinates for breach of sanctuary after they had violently dragged one Henry Mullyng from the safety of Ely cathedral, and put him in the town gaol. In early 1459 the MP appeared before two of the bishop’s commissaries in Ely cathedral to answer for his actions. At an initial hearing, held in January that year, he claimed to have acted within the bounds of royal statute and Church custom. At another, he argued that the conflicting laws of Church and King had placed him and his officials in a difficult position, explaining that he had received various writs from the King ordering him either to hold Mullyng in prison until the next sessions to answer charges of felony, or to refer him to a higher temporal court. At a final hearing on 15 Apr. 1459, at which Mullyng was produced, Ansty claimed that the fugitive had neither given legitimate reason for seeking sanctuary, nor gone about it in the manner required by the law of the realm. Finally, Mullyng, induced to state before the coroner why he had sought sanctuary, admitted that he had beaten one of his own servants to death with an iron bar, that he had stolen a horse and that he had abetted and sheltered thieves and robbers. He again requested sanctuary, whereupon the commissaries received him into the immunity of the Church.43 Reg. Gray, G1/5, ff. 117-18.

Any disfavour Ansty might have incurred through this affair was of short duration. In the following October, Gray granted two licences, one allowing Ansty to choose his own confessor and another permitting Walter Lokton (son of Thomas*, Ansty’s fellow knight of the shire of 1455) and Anne, daughter of Robert Allington, to marry in the Ansty chapel at Holme Hall.44 Ibid. ff. 44v, 45. The licence relating to a confessor might suggest that Ansty was by now feeling the onset of old age and infirmity. Whatever the case, he died within a year, on 4 Aug. 1460.45 C139/175/15. In his will, made on the day of his death,46 PCC 21 Stokton. he named his wife Joan and eldest son and namesake among his executors. To the latter he left Holme Hall in Stow-cum-Quy and two of his manors in Teversham. To his wife Joan he left a life interest in two other Teversham manors, with remainder after her death to his second son, Robert. She was also to have a life interest in two more manors, one at Cherry Hinton, with remainder to his daughter Mary, and the other at Clifton Reynes, with remainder to his eldest daughter Joan and her husband, William Allington†. Joan had married Allington, the son of the testator’s near neighbour, William Allington II*, at the Ansty chapel at Holme Hall in 1458.47 Reg. Gray, G1/5, f. 27v. Her younger sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, were still unmarried when their father died. Elizabeth would afterwards marry William†, son of Walter Taylard*, and Mary became the wife of Henry Langley, a nephew of Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham.48 Bottomley, 217. Among other bequests, Ansty left his wife a gilt cup which the late Henry Somer had given him and to Thomas Lokton a black cloak lined with marten’s fur, indications perhaps of particular friendships between him and both men. Should Lokton not want the cloak, it was to go to John Battysford*, who was in any case to have a silver ring. In the will Ansty called Battysford his ‘pawtener’ but it is unclear whether the term referred to some sort of legal partnership.